A U.S. appeals court has paved the way for the only woman in the federal death penalty to be executed before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
The verdict, handed down Friday by a three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, concluded that a judge in the lower court erred when he dismissed Lisa Montgomery’s execution date last week in a command evacuated.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss has ruled that the Department of Justice is illegally resuming Montgomery’s execution and has revoked an order from the director of the prison bureau planning her death for Jan. 12.
Montgomery was to be killed in December by a lethal injection in the federal correctional complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, but Moss delayed the execution after her lawyers contracted a coronavirus that visited their client and asked him to extend the time. to file a plea. petition.
Moss concluded that the Office of Prisons under his command could only reschedule the execution of Montgomery until at least January 1st. But the appeals panel disagrees.
Meaghan VerGow, a lawyer for Montgomery, said her legal team would ask the full appellate court to review the case and said Montgomery should not be executed on January 12.
Montgomery was convicted of the murder of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwestern Missouri city of Skidmore in December 2004.
She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and cut the baby girl out of the womb with a kitchen knife, authorities said. Prosecutors took Montgomery with the child and tried to hand over the girl as her own.
Montgomery’s legal team has argued that she has serious mental illness. One of her lawyers, Sandra Babcock, said in an earlier statement: ‘Given the seriousness of Mrs. Montgomery’s mental illness, the sexual and physical torture she has experienced throughout her life, and the connection between her trauma and the facts of her crime, we appeal to. to President Trump to grant her pardon and commute her sentence to life in prison. ”
Biden is against the death penalty and his spokesman, TJ Ducklo, said he would work to end its use. But Biden did not say whether he would stop federal executions after taking office on January 20.